How Marketers Reach Young Consumers: Implications for Nutrition Education and Health Promotion Campaigns

Family Economics and Nutrition Review, Fall, 1998 by Vivica Kraak, David L. Pelletier

Regulation is one potential approach to address intensive marketing practices. The focus of this paper is, however, to encourage nutrition educators to reflect on current approaches and consider applying what has been learned from market research to create more effective nutrition and health promotion messages. We encourage nutrition educators to use a variety of channels to deliver those messages and to identify common interests with the public and private sectors to deliver consistent messages.

It may be strategically necessary to create partnerships with stakeholders who are also concerned about the influence of commercialism on children and teenagers because public health budgets are insufficient to compete with the multimillion dollar campaigns of manufacturers and marketers, The next section examines how market research methods and the knowledge gained from marketing strategies and techniques can be used advantageously to design and deliver more effective health promotion and nutrition education interventions. Effective interventions, in this case, are ones that encourage healthful eating and lifestyle habits among children and teenage youth.

Using Market Research and Advertising Techniques to Design Nutrition Interventions

Many nutrition education programs are based upon health-oriented models that emphasize the underlying cognitive, psychological, and environmental influences on dietary behaviors and lifestyles (11). Consumer-oriented models emphasize information and skills that are instrumental in the marketplace. Market research can provide a wealth of information to nutrition educators about how young consumers view the world and function within it. Consumer behavior research and communications research can provide useful information on children's and parents' attitudes, perceptions, and behavior and provide information on media channels that can best reach targeted groups. These types of research can be viewed as stepping stones to link scientific findings about diet and chronic disease effectively to the desirable food- and nutrition-related perceptions, attitudes, motivations, decisions, and behavior of young consumers.

Public health practitioners have increasingly turned to communication programs as a major strategy to prevent the premature morbidity and mortality associated with chronic diseases in adults. Social marketing is explicitly based on marketing principles. It is one example of a communications program that provides a framework and guidelines that nutrition and health educators can use systematically to address problems related to health promotion and dietary behavior. Social marketing is most often used to accomplish the following objectives: to disseminate new information to individuals, to offset the negative effects of a practice or promotional effort by another organization or group, and to motivate people to move from intention to action (25). This type of campaign directed specifically at children and teenage youth could introduce and disseminate new ideas. It can increase the prevalence of desirable behavior among these target groups.